NYC Bike Lanes Blocked by Everything, Including Cops

The Bike War of 2011 has many fronts, including the NYPD against cyclists, with tickets at an all-time high, and the public (or politicians) against bike lines, with no one able to agree on how useful they are. Well maybe, DNAinfo proposes today, they're not getting the use they're meant to because they're not always the safest place to ride. When the actor and filmmaker Casey Neistat was ticketed recently for not riding in the lanes, he made a video of him crashing into obstacles to prove the point. Now he has some journalism to back him up.

In a first-person investigation, DNAinfo found that "Manhattan bike riders face a host of obstacles using the borough's bike lanes, from double-parked livery cabs and delivery trucks, to oblivious pedestrians, to NYPD vehicles using them as parking spaces."

One of the very worst spots to ride in a lane, they discovered, "was directly behind an NYPD precinct in Harlem," where 27 NYPD vehicles obstructed the lane.

Elsewhere, it was double-parked cars, delivery trucks, vendors, and pedestrians, all of which combine to make getting around New York City like a game of Frogger in which we all only have one life.